I think Jeremy Moore is a man who cannot sit still and is constantly looking for the next musical high. We last saw him in post-punk project Zabus, on Saccharine Underground, a label Moore runs himself in Washington DC. He has turned his hand to creating experimental, avant garde dark music, melding it with a myriad of genres, in the guise of Bell Barrow, culminating in the album “CoreCore Pulp.” Made up of twelve instrumental tracks, Moore plays all instruments as well as being the composer.
You are set about the road with the first track “An Eye On The Future,” with quasar pulsating like waves, repeating on loop, stretching into a pained infinity across time and space. Whirring and high-pitched extrusions pierce your ears until they become a conglomeration of psychedelic noise, married to a now existing drum.
Noise inspired jazz can be the only way to describe “Coffin Text” with both the free form of the music and drumming triplets. The main guitar is heavy and cumbersome in comparison, while there is another guitar, with possibly a plectrum being dragged down the strings in similar fashion as heard on Bauhaus‘ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
The guitar is the main voice in “Peace Field Autopsy,” grinding and dark, hanging ominously in the air, daring you to deny its black metal pall. There is free-flowing feedback looped back in creating a cacophony, which is over far too soon, giving way to a more ambient tone.
There is something utterly compelling about the last track “From Hunter To Remains,” with an eeriness that is both unsettling in its discordant drone and impossible to ignore the sweeping void as the instruments join in the decay.
The artwork for the tracks is mind bending, because the more you try to make sense of the picture, the less it makes, and in a way this perfectly encapsulates CoreCore Pulp, which could be the name an avant garde noise album, but it becomes apparent there is so much going on below the surface. I have chosen four tracks to showcase how Bell Barrow is using different styles of music, not in a cohesive manner, but rather to create abrasion and discord, battering the listener into submission if they fight the jarring flow. The use of extreme experimentation with black metal, jazz, prog rock, etcetera, melds the instrumentals into sonic scapes for your imagination to run rampant. The base interpretation is about life and death, though for myself, it is about this flesh we call home. The fragility, what can be achieved with the spirit, and, perhaps, the futility of it all. Bleak and yet a beauty in that ultimate desecration called death.
Onyx Music Reviews 